1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information providing method for use with an apparatus for providing information via a radio telephone line, for example, and a communication terminal apparatus for processing the information provided by this information providing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Heretofore, there have been made available a variety of mobile communication systems using a communication terminal apparatus. For example, a communication terminal apparatus capable of communicating with a communication base station side prepared as a radio telephone system by radio waves is prepared and an outgoing call is made from this communication terminal apparatus or an incoming call is received at the communication terminal apparatus, whereby a user can communicate with an arbitrary called person connected to the communication terminal apparatus via the base station. Further, there has been developed a terminal apparatus which becomes able to exchange character messages between it and the called person by transmitting and receiving character data coded by a predetermined system other than communication based on audio data.
It is customary that general users may make a telephone communication for several minutes to several 10s of minutes in a day, for example, and a standby time in which a user is not in communication is rather long. In this case, however, in order to receive an incoming call from the base station side, the user constantly places the terminal apparatus in the standby mode so as to receive an incoming call even when the terminal apparatus is not in communication.
Accordingly, the user should constantly carry the communication terminal apparatus when the communication terminal apparatus is not in use. In this case, when the communication terminal apparatus is not in use as the telephone set, such communication terminal apparatus is useless.
To solve the aforementioned problem, there have heretofore been developed a variety of multi-function communication terminal apparatus. For example, there have been developed a variety of multi-function communication terminal apparatus in which a function of a portable information management apparatus called a PDA (personal digital assistants) is assembled into a portable telephone thereby to manage a schedule and to transmit and receive electronic mails after the portable information manage apparatus was connected to a predetermined data communication network such as an internet or the like.
In this conventional multi-function communication terminal apparatus, its operation for executing other processing than the communication is comparatively complex. Also, the conventional multi-function communication terminal apparatus includes a display portion of large-size so that the shape of the terminal apparatus becomes relatively large.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide a communication terminal apparatus which can be effectively utilized in other purposes than a communication and its method.
According to an aspect of the present invention, there is provided an information providing method which is comprised of the steps of accumulating data composed of a plurality of still pictures relating to each other in a center connected to a predetermined communication line, downloading data composed a plurality of still pictures accumulated in the center to a memory housed in a communication terminal apparatus in response to a request from the communication terminal apparatus under the condition that the communication terminal apparatus and the center are connected by a communication line and displaying a plurality of still pictures stored in the memory one by one on a display unit of the communication terminal apparatus in a predetermined order according to a predetermined operation of the communication terminal apparatus after the connection made by the communication line is disconnected.
In accordance with another aspect of the present invention, there is provided a communication terminal apparatus which is comprised of a reception unit for receiving a signal transmitted from a predetermined communication base station, a transmission unit for transmitting a signal to the communication base station, a memory for memorizing a plurality of still picture data received at the reception unit, a display unit for displaying a still picture based on data memorized in the memory, an operation unit for instructing switching of a display of a still picture on the display unit and a control unit for changing still pictures displayed on the display unit one by one in the order set in the still pictures based on the operation of the operation unit.
According to the information providing method of the present invention and the communication terminal apparatus of the present invention to which this information providing method is applied, a plurality of still pictures based on data downloaded onto the communication terminal apparatus can be sequentially displayed by operating its terminal apparatus.